Conversation

Will the structural effect operations be labelled?

Apr 3, 2021

they’re named, but the names are a contract between sender and receiver only, i.e. local to a given scope, just like a variable name is a contract between the binding site and any reference sites.

Rob Rix‎

@rob_rix

Apr 3, 2021

to be clear, that’s just the formalism I’m designing. Facet itself uses nominally-typed interfaces, and the closest that will approach structural interfaces is if I allow local or inline definitions of them.

Brendan Zabarauskas

@brendanzab

Apr 3, 2021

Nice, seems like this might address this concern

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Brendan Zabarauskas

@brendanzab

· Apr 3, 2021

Replying to @brendanzab and @rob_rix

Been a bit spooked with the ‘stringy’ nature of the implementations row labels I’ve seen. Seems to pose some issues for modularity? I dunno.

Rob Rix‎

@rob_rix

Apr 3, 2021

yeah. the formalism is a sequent calculus, i.e. not a software engineering system :) so I’m much less concerned about that kind of modularity because it doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of modules (or anything outside expressions, in fact!)

Rob Rix‎

@rob_rix

Apr 3, 2021

that said, extending it to integrate modules into the effect language is a pretty major goal, because I want to use that for parameterized modules, cross-compilation targets, metaprogramming, inline tests, and a bunch of other stuff.

Brendan Zabarauskas

@brendanzab

Apr 3, 2021

Yeah I’ve been wondering about this for Pikelet, where I’m hoping to use records as modules. I love the idea of smooshing together structures, but don’t like the idea that I might then run into issues with fields clashing…

Rob Rix‎

@rob_rix

Apr 3, 2021

yeah, if field names are actually named entities, that problem goes away, altho I suppose it raises the question of where those are defined… who namespaces the namespaces themselves? quis namespa… you know what, never mind the mock-latin

Brendan Zabarauskas

@brendanzab

Apr 3, 2021

Yeah! It gets a bit weird! Clojure lets you have ‘namespaced symbols’ but that requires a top level namespace thingy. Where as I would love to be able to get rid of the top level ‘command’ language (like in Dhall and Nix)

Rob Rix‎

@rob_rix

Apr 3, 2021

Similar problem in my formalism: lambdas are scope + readerish effect. But definitions of ops are functions. Where do you tie the knot? (Currently thinking about jumps instead of functions.)